L.S. VYGOTSKY Play And Its Role In The Mental Development Of A Child

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

When we talk about play and its role in the development of a preschooler, two main questions arise here. The first question is about how play itself arises in development, the question of the origin of play, its genesis; the second question is what role does this activity play in development, what does play mean as a form of child development in preschool age. Is play the leading or just the predominant form of the child's activity at this age?

It seems to me that from the point of view of development, play is not the predominant form of activity, but it is, in a sense, the leading line of development in preschool age.

Now let me turn to the problem of the game itself. We know that defining play in terms of the pleasure it brings to a child is not a correct definition for two reasons. First, because we are dealing with a number of activities that can bring a child much more acute experiences of pleasure than play.

The pleasure principle applies in the same way, for example, to the sucking process, for the infant has a functional pleasure in sucking on the nipple even when he is not satiated.

On the other hand, we know games in which the very process of activity still does not give pleasure - games that dominate at the end of preschool and early school age and which bring pleasure only if their result turns out to be interesting for the child; these are, for example, the so-called "sports games" (sports games are not only physical education games, but also games with a win, games with results). They are very often colored by acute feelings of displeasure when the game ends against the child.

Thus, the definition of play on the basis of pleasure, of course, cannot be considered correct.

However, it seems to me that to abandon the approach to the problem of play from the point of view of how the child's needs, his motives for activity, his affective aspirations are realized in it would mean terribly to intellectualize play. The difficulty of a number of theories of play is some intellectualization of this problem.

I am inclined to attach an even more general significance to this question and I think that the mistake of a number of age-related theories is to ignore the needs of the child - understanding them in a broad sense, starting with drives and ending with interest as a need of an intellectual nature - in short, ignoring everything that can be combined under the name of motives and motives of activity. We often explain the development of a child by the development of his intellectual functions, i.e. before us, every child appears as a theoretical being, which, depending on the greater or lesser level of intellectual development, passes from one age stage to another.

Needs, drives, motives of the child, the motives of his activity are not taken into account, without which, as research shows, the child's transition from one stage to another is never made. In particular, it seems to me that the analysis of the game should begin with the clarification of precisely these points.

Apparently, every shift, every transition from one age level to another is associated with a sharp change in motives and impulses for activity.

What is the greatest value for an infant almost ceases to interest the child at an early age. This ripening of new needs, new motives for activity, of course, should be highlighted. In particular, one cannot fail to see that the child in play satisfies some needs, some motives, and that without understanding the originality of these motives, we cannot imagine that peculiar type of activity that play is.

In preschool age, peculiar needs arise, peculiar motives that are very important for the entire development of the child, which directly lead to play. They consist in the fact that a child at this age has a whole series of unrealizable tendencies, unrealizable desires directly. The young child has a tendency to directly resolve and satisfy his desires. Delaying the fulfillment of a desire is difficult for a young child, it is possible only within some narrow limits; no one knew a child under three years old who would have the desire to do something in a few days. Usually, the path from motivation to its implementation is extremely short. It seems to me that if at preschool age we did not have the maturation of urgently unrealizable needs, then we would not have a game. Research shows that not only where we deal with children who are not intellectually developed enough, but also where we have an underdevelopment of the affective sphere, play does not develop.

It seems to me that from the point of view of the affective sphere, play is created in such a developmental situation when unrealizable tendencies appear. An early child behaves like this: he wants to take a thing and he needs to take it now. If this thing cannot be taken, then he either makes a scandal - lies on the floor and kicks, or he refuses, reconciles, does not take this thing. His unsatisfied desires have their own special ways of substitution, refusal, etc. By the beginning of preschool age, unsatisfied desires appear, tendencies unrealized immediately, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the tendency of an early age to the immediate realization of desires persists. The child wants, for example, to be in the mother's place or wants to be a rider and ride a horse. This is an unrealizable desire now. What does a young child do if he sees a passing cab and wants to drive on it at all costs? If this is a capricious and spoiled child, then he will demand from his mother to be put on this cab by all means, he can rush to the ground right there on the street, etc. If this is an obedient child, accustomed to giving up desires, then he will leave, or the mother will offer him candy, or simply distract him with some stronger affect, and the child will give up his immediate desire.

In contrast, after three years, a child develops a kind of contradictory tendencies; on the one hand, he has a whole series of immediately unrealizable needs, desires that are not feasible now and nevertheless are not eliminated like desires; on the other hand, he retains almost entirely the tendency towards the immediate realization of desires.

This is where play, which, from the point of view of the question of why the child is playing, must always be understood as an imaginary illusory realization of unrealizable desires.

Imagination is that new formation that is absent in the consciousness of a young child, is absolutely absent in an animal and which represents a specific human form of consciousness activity; like all functions of consciousness, it arises initially in action. The old formula that children's play is imagination in action can be reversed and said that the imagination of adolescents and schoolchildren is play without action.

It is difficult to imagine that the impulse forcing a child to play was really just an affective urge of the same kind as in an infant sucking on a nipple.

It is difficult to admit that the pleasure of preschool play is due to the same affective mechanism as simple nipple sucking. This does not fit with anything in terms of preschooler development.

All this does not mean that play arises as a result of each individual unsatisfied desire - the child wanted to ride on a cab - this desire was not satisfied now, the child came into the room and began to play with the cab. This never happens. Here we are talking about the fact that the child has not only individual affective reactions to individual phenomena, but generalized unobjective affective tendencies. Take a child with an inferiority complex, microcephalus, for example; he could not be in the children's collective - he was so teased that he began to break all the mirrors and glass where his image was. This is a profound difference from early age; there, with a separate phenomenon (in a specific situation), for example, each time they tease, a separate affective reaction arises, which is not yet generalized. In preschool age, a child generalizes his affective attitude towards a phenomenon, regardless of the actual specific situation, since the attitude is affectively connected with the meaning of the phenomenon, and therefore he always displays a complex of inferiority.

The essence of play is that it is the fulfillment of desires, but not individual desires, but generalized affects. A child at this age is aware of his relationship with adults, he reacts to them affectively, but unlike early childhood, he generalizes these affective reactions (he is impressed by the authority of adults in general, etc.).

The presence of such generalized affects in play does not mean that the child himself understands the motives for which the game is being started, that he does it consciously. He plays without being aware of the motives of the play activity. This significantly distinguishes play from labor and other activities. In general, it must be said that the area of motives, actions, impulses is one of the less conscious and becomes fully accessible to consciousness only at a transitional age. Only a teenager realizes for himself a clear account of why he is doing this or that. Now let us leave the question of the affective side for a few minutes, let us look at this as a prerequisite, and see how play activity itself unfolds.

It seems to me that the criterion for distinguishing a child's play activity from the general group of other forms of his activity should be taken as the fact that the child creates an imaginary situation in play. This becomes possible on the basis of the discrepancy between the visible and semantic field that appears in preschool age.

This idea is not new in the sense that the existence of a game with an imaginary situation has always been known, but it was considered as one of the groups of the game. In this case, the importance of a secondary sign was attached to an imaginary situation. The imaginary situation was not, in the minds of the old authors, the main quality that makes a game a game, since only one specific group of games was characterized by this feature.

The main difficulty of this thought, it seems to me, lies in three points. First, there is the danger of an intellectualistic approach to play; there may be fears that if the game is understood as symbolism, then it seems to turn into some kind of activity, similar to algebra in action; it turns into a system of some kind of signs that generalize real reality; here we no longer find anything specific to play and imagine the child as a failed algebraist who does not yet know how to write signs on paper, but depicts them in action. It is necessary to show the connection with the motives in the game, because the game itself, it seems to me, is never a symbolic action in the proper sense of the word.

Second, it seems to me that this thought represents play as a cognitive process, it indicates the significance of this cognitive process, leaving aside not only the affective moment, but also the moment of the child's activity

The third point is that it is necessary to reveal what this activity does in development, i.e. that with the help of an imaginary situation a child can develop

Let us start with the second question, if I may, since I have already briefly touched on the question of the connection with affective motivation. We have seen that in the affective impulse that leads to play, there are the beginnings not of symbolism, but of the necessity of an imaginary situation, for if play really develops from unsatisfied desires, from unrealizable tendencies, if it consists in the fact that it is a realization in a playful form tendencies that are currently unrealizable, then, involuntarily, the very affective nature of this game will contain moments of an imaginary situation.

Let's start with the second moment - with the child's activity in play. What does the behavior of a child in an imaginary situation mean? We know that there is a form of play, which was also highlighted a long time ago, and which usually belonged to the late period of preschool age; its development was considered central at school age; we are talking about games with rules. A number of researchers, although not at all belonging to the camp of dialectical materialists, have followed in this area the way that Marx recommends when he says that "human anatomy is the key to the anatomy of ape." They began to view early age play in the light of this late game with rules, and their research led them to conclude that playing with an imaginary situation is essentially a game with rules; It seems to me that one can even put forward the position that there is no play where there is no child's behavior with the rules, his peculiar attitude to the rules.

Let me clarify this idea. Take any game with an imaginary situation. Already an imaginary situation contains rules of behavior, although this is not a game with developed rules formulated in advance. The child imagined himself as a mother, and the doll as a child, he must behave, obeying the rules of maternal behavior. This was shown very well by one of the researchers in an ingenious experiment, which he based on the famous observations of Selli. The latter, as is known, described the game, remarkable in that the game situation and the real situation in children coincided. Two sisters - one five, the other seven - once conspired: "Let's play sisters." Thus, Selli described a case where two sisters played the fact that they were two sisters, i.e. acted out a real situation. The experiment mentioned above based its methodology on the play of children, suggested by the experimenter, but a game that took on real relationships. In some cases, I have succeeded extremely easily in evoking such play in children. So, it is very easy to make a child play with his mother in the fact that he is a child, and the mother is a mother, i.e. into what it really is. The essential difference between the game, as Selly describes it, is that the child, starting to play, tries to be a sister. A girl behaves in life without thinking that she is a sister in relation to another. She does nothing in relation to the other, because she is the sister of this other, except, perhaps, in those cases when the mother says: "give in." In the sisters' game of "sisters," each of the sisters continually manifests its sisterhood all the time; the fact that two sisters began to play sisters leads to the fact that each of them receives rules for behavior. (I have to be a sister to another sister in the whole play situation.) Only actions that fit these rules are playable, suitable for the situation.

The game takes a situation that emphasizes that these girls are sisters, they are dressed alike, they walk holding hands; in a word, what is taken is what emphasizes their position as sisters in relation to adults, in relation to strangers. The eldest, holding the younger by the hand, all the time says about those who portray people: "These are strangers, these are not ours." This means: "I act the same with my sister, we are treated the same, and others, strangers, differently."Here there is an emphasis on the sameness of everything that for the child is concentrated in the concept of a sister, and this means that my sister stands in a different relation to me than strangers. That which is imperceptible for the child exists in life, in the game becomes the rule of behavior.

Thus, it turns out that if you create a game so that it would seem that there would be no imaginary situation in it, then what remains? The rule remains. What remains is that the child begins to behave in this situation, as this situation dictates.

Let's leave this wonderful experiment in the field of play for a moment and turn to any game. It seems to me that wherever there is an imaginary situation in the game, there is a rule everywhere. Not the rules formulated in advance and changing throughout the game, but the rules arising from an imaginary situation. Therefore, imagine that a child can behave in an imaginary situation without rules, i.e. the way he behaves in a real situation is simply impossible. If a child plays the role of a mother, then he has rules for the mother's behavior. The role played by the child, his attitude to the object, if the object has changed its meaning, will always follow from the rule, i.e. an imaginary situation will always contain rules. In play, the child is free, but this is an illusory freedom.

If the task of the researcher at first was to reveal the implicit rule contained in any game with an imaginary situation, then relatively recently we obtained proof that the so-called "pure game with rules" (a schoolboy and a preschooler's game by the end of this age) is essentially a game with an imaginary situation, for just as an imaginary situation necessarily contains rules of behavior, so any game with rules contains an imaginary situation. What does it mean, for example, to play chess? Create an imaginary situation. Why? Because an officer can only walk like this, the king like this, and the queen like that; beat, remove from the board, etc. - these are purely chess concepts; but there is still some imaginary situation, although it does not directly replace life relations. Take the simplest rule game from kids. It immediately turns into an imaginary situation in the sense that as soon as the game is regulated by some rules, then a number of real actions are impossible in relation to this.

Just as in the beginning it was possible to show that every imaginary situation contains rules in a hidden form, it was also possible to show the opposite - that any game with rules contains an imaginary situation in a hidden form. The development from an explicit imaginary situation and hidden rules to a game with explicit rules and a hidden imaginary situation and makes up two poles, outlines the evolution of children's play.

Every game with an imaginary situation is at the same time a game with rules, and every game with rules is a game with an imaginary situation. This position seems clear to me.

However, there is one misunderstanding that must be eliminated from the outset. A child learns to behave according to a well-known rule from the first months of his life. If you take a child of an early age, then the rules that you have to sit at the table and be silent, not touch other people's things, obey the mother - are the rules that the child's life is full of. What is specific about the rules of the game? It seems to me that the solution of this issue becomes possible in connection with some new work. In particular, Piaget's new work on the development of moral rules in the child has been of great help to me here; there is one part of this work devoted to the study of the rules of the game, in which Piaget gives, it seems to me, an extremely convincing solution to these difficulties.

Piaget shares two, as he puts it, morals in a child, two sources of development of the rules of children's behavior, which are different from each other.

In play, this comes out with particular clarity. Some rules arise in a child, as Piaget shows, from the one-sided influence of an adult on a child. If you cannot touch other people's things, then this rule was taught by the mother; or it is necessary to sit quietly at the table - this is what adults put forward as an external law in relation to the child. This is one moral of the child. Other rules arise, as Piaget says, from the mutual cooperation of an adult and a child or children with each other; these are the rules, in the establishment of which the child himself participates.

The game rules, of course, differ significantly from the rule not to touch other people's things and sit quietly at the table; first of all, they differ in that they are established by the child himself. These are his rules for himself, the rules, as Piaget says, of internal self-restraint and self-determination. The child says to himself: "I have to behave this way and that in this game." This is completely different from when a child is told that it is possible, but it is not possible. Piaget showed a very interesting phenomenon in the development of children's morality, which he calls moral realism; he points out that the first line of development of external rules (what is allowed and what is not) leads to moral realism, i.e. to the fact that the child confuses moral rules with physical rules; he confuses that it is impossible to light a match once lit a second time and that it is generally forbidden to light matches or touch a glass, because it can be broken; all these “no's” for a child at an early age are one and the same, he has a completely different attitude to the rules that he sets himself *.

Let us now turn to the question of the role of play, of its influence on the development of the child. It seems huge to me.

I will try to convey two main points. I think that playing with an imaginary situation is essentially new, impossible for a child under three years old; this is a new kind of behavior, the essence of which is that activity in an imaginary situation frees the child from situational connectedness.

The behavior of a young child to a large extent, the behavior of an infant in an absolute degree, as shown by the experiments of Levin et al., Is behavior determined by the position in which the activity takes place. A famous example is Levin's experience with a stone. This experience is a real illustration of the extent to which a young child is bound in every action by the position in which his activity takes place. We found in this an extremely characteristic feature for the behavior of a young child in the sense of his attitude to the close environment, to the real situation in which his activity proceeds. It is difficult to imagine the great opposite of what these experiments of Lewin depict for us in the sense of the situational connectedness of activity, with what we see in play: in play, the child learns to act in a cognizable rather than a visible situation. It seems to me that this formula accurately conveys what is happening in the game. In play, the child learns to act in the cognized, i.e. in a mental, not a visible situation, relying on internal tendencies and motives, and not on motives and impulses that come from a thing. Let me remind you of Levin's teaching about the incentive nature of things for a young child, about the fact that things dictate to him what to do - the door pulls the child to open and close it, the stairs - to run up, the bell - to that to call. In a word, things have an inherent incentive power in relation to the actions of a child of an early age; it determines the behavior of the child so much that Levin came to the idea of creating a psychological topology, i.e. to express mathematically the trajectory of the child's movement in the field, depending on how things are located there with various forces that are attractive and repulsive to the child.

What is the root of a child's situational connectedness? We found it in one central fact of consciousness characteristic of early age and consisting in the unity of affect and perception. Perception at this age is generally not independent, but the initial moment in the motor-affective reaction, i.e.all perception is thus a stimulus to activity. Since the situation is always psychologically given through perception, and perception is not separated from affective and motor activity, it is clear that a child with such a structure of consciousness cannot act otherwise than as bound by the situation, as bound by the field in which he is.

In play, things lose their motivating character. The child sees one thing, but acts differently in relation to the visible. Thus, it turns out that the child begins to act regardless of what he sees. There are patients with some brain damage who lose this ability to act regardless of what they see; at the sight of these patients, you begin to understand that the freedom of action that each of us and a child of a more mature age has, was not given immediately, but had to go through a long path of development.

Action in a situation that is not seen, but only thought, action in an imaginary field, in an imaginary situation leads to the fact that the child learns to be determined in his behavior not only by the direct perception of the thing or the situation directly acting on him, but by the meaning of this situation.

Young children discover in experiments and in everyday observation the impossibility for them of the discrepancy between the semantic and visible fields. This is a very important fact. Even a two-year-old child, when he must repeat, looking at the child sitting in front of him: "Tanya is coming," changes the phrase and says: "Tanya is sitting." In some diseases we are dealing with exactly the same position. Goldstein and Gelb described a number of patients who do not know how to say what is wrong. Gelb has materials about a patient who, being able to write well with his left hand, could not write the phrase: “I can write well with my right hand”; looking out the window in good weather, he could not repeat the phrase: "Today is bad weather," but said: "Today is good weather." Very often, in a patient with speech impairment, we have a symptom of the impossibility of repeating a meaningless phrase, for example: "The snow is black," at a time when a number of other phrases, equally difficult in grammatical and semantic composition, are repeated.

In a young child, there is a close fusion of a word with a thing, meaning with the visible, in which the discrepancy between the semantic field and the visible field becomes impossible.

This can be understood based on the development of children's speech. You say to the child - "watch". He starts searching and finds a watch, i.e. the first function of the word is to orientate in space, to highlight individual places in space; the word originally means a known place in a situation.

In preschool age, in play, we have for the first time a discrepancy between the semantic field and the optical field. It seems to me that it is possible to repeat the thought of one of the researchers who says that in a play action, a thought is separated from a thing, and the action begins from a thought, and not from a thing.

The thought is separated from the thing because a piece of wood begins to play the role of a doll, the wand becomes a horse, the action according to the rules begins to be determined from the thought, and not from the thing itself. This is such a revolution in the child's attitude to a real, concrete immediate situation, which is difficult to assess in all its meaning. The child does not do this right away. Separating a thought (meaning of a word) from a thing is a terribly difficult task for a child. Play is a transitional form to this. At that moment, when the stick, i.e. a thing becomes a reference point for separating the meaning of a horse from a real horse, at this critical moment one of the basic psychological structures that determines the child's attitude to reality changes radically.

The child cannot yet tear away thought from a thing; he must have a fulcrum in another thing; here we have an expression of this weakness of the child; in order to think about a horse, he needs to determine his actions with this horse, in a stick, at a fulcrum. But nevertheless, at this critical moment, the basic structure that determines the child's attitude to reality, namely the structure of perception, changes radically. The peculiarity of human perception that arises at an early age is the so-called "real perception". This is something to which we have nothing analogous in the perception of an animal. The essence of this lies in the fact that I see not only the world as colors and shapes, but also the world that has meaning and meaning. I see not something round, black, with two hands, but I see a clock and I can separate one from the other. There are patients who, upon seeing a watch, will say that they see a round, white one with two thin steel stripes, but do not know that it is a watch, they have lost their real attitude to the thing. So, the structure of human perception could be figuratively expressed in the form of a fraction, the numerator of which is the thing, and the denominator is the meaning; this expresses the well-known relationship between thing and meaning, which arises from speech. This means that each human perception is not a single perception, but a generalized perception. Goldstein says that such subject-specific perception and generalization are one and the same. Here in this fraction - the thing-meaning - the thing is dominant in the child; meaning is directly related to it. At that critical moment when the child's wand becomes a horse, i.e. when a thing - a stick - becomes a reference point in order to tear off the meaning of a horse from a real horse, this fraction, as the researcher says, overturns, and the semantic moment becomes dominant: meaning / thing.

All the same, the properties of the thing as such retain considerable importance: any stick can play the role of a horse, but, for example, a postcard cannot be a horse for a child. Goethe's position that for a child in play everything can become everything is wrong. For adults, with conscious symbolism, of course, a card can be a horse. If I want to show the location of the experiments, I put a match and say - this is a horse. And that's enough. For a child, it cannot be a horse, there must be a stick, so play is not symbolism. A symbol is a sign, and a stick is not a sign of a horse. The properties of a thing are preserved, but their meaning is overturned, i.e. the central point is thought. We can say that things in this structure from a dominant moment become something subordinate.

Thus, the child in play creates such a structure - meaning / thing, where the semantic side, the meaning of the word, the meaning of the thing, is dominant, determining his behavior.

Meaning is emancipated to some extent from the thing with which it was previously directly merged. I would say that in play the child operates with a meaning that is divorced from a thing, but it is inseparable from a real action with a real object.

Thus, an extremely interesting contradiction arises, which consists in the fact that the child operates with meanings divorced from things and actions, but operates with them inseparably from some real action and some other real thing. This is the transitional nature of play, which makes it an intermediate link between the purely situational connectedness of an early age and thinking, divorced from the real situation.

In play, the child operates with things as things that have meaning, operates with the meanings of words that replace a thing, therefore, in play, the emancipation of the word from the thing occurs (the behaviorist would describe the play and its characteristic properties as follows: the child calls ordinary things unusual names, his usual actions unusual notwithstanding the fact that he knows the real names).

The separation of a word from a thing needs a support point in the form of another thing. But at the moment when the stick, that is, the thing, becomes a reference point for the separation of the meaning "horse" from the real horse (a child cannot tear the meaning from a thing or a word from a thing otherwise than by finding a fulcrum in another thing, that is, by the force of one things to steal the name of another), he makes one thing, as it were, affect another in the semantic field. The transfer of meanings is facilitated by the fact that the child takes a word for a property of a thing, does not see the word, but sees behind it the thing he signifies. For a child, the word "horse", referred to a stick, means: "there is a horse", i.e. he mentally sees the thing behind the word.

The game moves on to internal processes at school age, to internal speech, logical memory, abstract thinking. In play, the child operates with meanings that are divorced from things, but inseparably from real action with real objects, but the separation of the horse's meaning from the real horse and transferring it to the stick (a material fulcrum, otherwise the meaning will evaporate, evaporate) and real action with the stick, as with horse, there is a necessary transitional stage to operating with meanings, that is, the child first acts with meanings, as with things, and then realizes them and begins to think, that is, in the same way as before grammatical and written speech a child has skills, but does not know that has them, that is, does not realize and does not own them arbitrarily; in play, the child unconsciously and involuntarily uses the fact that it is possible to detach the meaning from the thing, that is, he does not know what he is doing, does not know that he is speaking in prose, just as he speaks, but does not notice the words.

Hence the functional definition of concepts, i.e. of things, hence, the word is part of the thing.

So, I would like to say that the fact of creating an imaginary situation is not an accidental fact in a child's life, it has the first consequence of the child's emancipation from situational connectedness. The first paradox of play is that the child operates with a torn-off meaning, but in a real situation. The second paradox is that the child acts along the line of least resistance in play, i.e. he does what he most wants, because the game is connected with pleasure. At the same time, he learns to act along the line of greatest resistance: obeying the rules, children refuse what they want, since obeying the rules and refusing to act on an immediate impulse in play is the way to maximum pleasure.

If you take the kids to a sports game, you will see the same thing. Running a race turns out to be difficult, because the runners are ready to jump off the spot when you say "1, 2 …", and do not survive until 3. Obviously, the essence of internal rules is that the child should not act on an immediate impulse.

Play continuously, at every step, creates demands on the child to act in spite of the immediate impulse, i.e. act along the line of greatest resistance. Immediately I want to run - this is quite clear, but the game rules tell me to stop. Why does the child not do what he immediately wants to do now? Because the observance of the rules throughout the structure of the game promises such a great pleasure from the game, which is more than an immediate impulse; in other words, as one of the researchers declares, recalling the words of Spinoza, "the affect can only be defeated by another, stronger affect." Thus, a situation is created in play in which, as Zero says, a double affective plan arises. A child, for example, cries in play, like a patient, but rejoices like a player. The child refuses to play the direct impulse, coordinating his behavior, each of his actions with the rules of the game. Gross described this brilliantly. His idea is that the will of a child is born and develops from playing with the rules. Indeed, the child in the simple game of sorcerers described by Gross must, in order not to lose, run away from the sorcerer; at the same time, he must help his comrade and disenchant him. When the sorcerer touches him, he must stop. At every step, the child comes to a conflict between the rule of the game and what he would do if he could now act directly: in the game he acts contrary to what he wants now. Zero showed that the greatest power of self-control in a child arises in play. He reached the maximum of the child's will in the sense of rejection of direct attraction in the game - sweets, which children should not eat according to the rules of the game, because they portrayed inedible things. Usually, the child experiences obedience to the rule in refusal of what he wants, but here - obedience to the rule and refusal to act on an immediate impulse is the path to maximum pleasure.

Thus, an essential feature of play is a rule that has become an affect. " An idea that has become an affect, a concept that has become a passion"Is the prototype of this ideal of Spinoza in play, which is the realm of arbitrariness and freedom. Compliance with the rule is a source of pleasure. The rule wins, as the strongest impulse (cf. Spinoza - the affect can be defeated by the strongest affect). It follows from this that such a rule is an internal rule, that is, a rule of internal self-restraint, self-determination, as Piaget says, and not a rule to which the child obeys, as a physical law. In short, play gives the child a new form of desire, i.e. teaches him to desire by correlating desires to a fictitious "I", that is, to the role in the game and its rule, therefore, the child's highest achievements are possible in the game, which tomorrow will become his average real level, his morality. Now we can say about a child's activity the same as we said about a thing. Just as there is a fraction - a thing / meaning, there is a fraction - an action / meaning.

If earlier the dominant moment was action, now this structure is overturned and the meaning becomes the numerator, and the action becomes the denominator.

It is important to understand what kind of release from actions the child receives in play, when this action becomes, instead of real, for example, eating, the movement of the fingers, i.e. when an action is performed not for the sake of the action, but for the sake of the meaning that it denotes.

In a preschool child, at first the action is dominant over its meaning, a lack of understanding of this action; the child knows how to do more than understand. In preschool age, for the first time, such a structure of action appears in which meaning is decisive; but the action itself is not a secondary, subordinate moment, but a structural moment. Zero showed that the children ate from a plate, making a series of movements with their hands that resembled real food, but actions that could not mean food at all became impossible. Throwing your hands back instead of pulling them towards the plate became impossible, i.e. it had a disruptive effect on the game. The child does not symbolize in the game, but desires, fulfills the desire, passes through the experience the main categories of reality, which is why the day is played in the game in half an hour, 100 miles are covered by five steps. The child, desiring, fulfills, thinking - acts; inseparability of internal action from external: imagination, comprehension and will, i.e. internal processes in external action.

The main thing is the meaning of the action, but the action itself is not indifferent. At an early age, the situation was reversed, i.e. action was structurally determining, and meaning was a secondary, secondary, subordinate moment. The same thing that we said about the separation of meaning from the object also applies to the child's own actions: a child who, standing still, treads, imagining that he is riding a horse, thereby overturning a fraction - action / meaning on meaning / action.

Again, in order to detach the meaning of the action from the real action (to ride a horse without being able to do this), the child needs a support point in the form of a substitute for real action. But again, if earlier in the structure "action - meaning" action was the determining one, now the structure is overturned and meaning becomes the determining one. The action is relegated to the background, it becomes a fulcrum - again the meaning is torn off from the action with the help of another action. This is again a repeated point on the path to purely operating with the meanings of actions, i.e. to a volitional choice, decision, struggle of motives and other processes sharply divorced from implementation, i.e.the path to will, just as operating with the meanings of things is the path to abstract thinking - after all, in a volitional decision, the decisive point is not the execution of the action itself, but its meaning. In the game, an action replaces another action, like a thing for another thing. How does a child “melt” one thing into another, one action into another? This is carried out through movement in the semantic field, not bound by the visible field, by real things, which subordinates all real things and real actions to itself.

This movement in the semantic field is the most important thing in the game: on the one hand, it is movement in an abstract field (the field, therefore, arises earlier than arbitrary manipulation of meanings), but the mode of movement is situational, concrete (i.e., not logical, and affective movement). In other words, a semantic field arises, but movement in it occurs in the same way as in the real one - this is the main genetic contradiction of the game. It remains for me to answer three questions: firstly, to show that play is not the predominant, but the leading moment in the development of the child, and secondly, to show what the development of play itself consists in, i.e. what does it mean to move from the predominance of an imaginary situation to the predominance of a rule; and third, to show what internal transformations play produces in a child's development.

I think that play is not the predominant type of child's activity. In basic life situations, the child behaves diametrically opposite to how he behaves in the game. In play, his action is subordinated to meaning, but in real life, his action, of course, dominates over meaning.

Thus, we have in play, if you will, the negative of the child's general life behavior. Therefore, it would be completely unfounded to regard play as the prototype of his life activity, as the predominant form. This is the main flaw in Koffka's theory, which views play as the child's other world. Everything that relates to a child, according to Koffka, is a playful reality. That which pertains to an adult is a serious reality. One and the same thing in the game has one meaning, outside of this - another meaning. In the children's world, the logic of desires dominates, the logic of gratification of attraction, and not real logic. The illusory nature of the game is transferred to life. This would be so if play were the predominant form of the child's activity; but it is difficult to imagine what kind of picture from an insane asylum the child would resemble if this form of activity that we are talking about, at least to some extent transferred into real life, became the predominant form of the child's life activity.

Koffka gives a number of examples of how a child transfers a play situation to life. But the real transfer of play behavior into life can only be seen as a painful symptom. To behave in a real situation, as in an illusory one, means to give the initial shoots of delirium.

As the study shows, play behavior in life is normally observed when play has the character of playing sisters "at sisters", i.e. children sitting at a real lunch can play at lunch or (in the example cited by Katz) children who do not want to go to bed say: “Let's play what it’s like it’s night, we have to go to bed”; they begin to play with what they are actually doing, obviously creating some other relationship, thus making it easier to perform the unpleasant act.

Thus, it seems to me that play is not the predominant type of activity in preschool age. Only in theories that consider the child not as a creature satisfying the basic requirements of life, but as a creature who lives in search of pleasures, seeks to satisfy these pleasures, can the thought arise that the children's world is a playful world.

Is it possible in a child's behavior such a situation that he always acted according to meaning, is it possible for a preschooler to behave so dryly that he does not behave with a candy the way he wants, just because of the thought that he should behave differently? This obedience to rules is a completely impossible thing in life; in play it becomes possible; thus, play creates the zone of proximal development of the child. In play, the child is always above his middle age, above his usual daily behavior; he is in the game, as it were, a cut above himself. Condensed play contains, as in the focus of a magnifying glass, all development trends; the child in the game is trying to make a jump above the level of his usual behavior.

The relationship of play to development should be compared to the relationship of learning to development. Behind the game are changes in needs and changes in consciousness of a more general nature. Play is a source of development and creates a zone of proximal development. Action in an imaginary field, in an imaginary situation, the creation of an arbitrary intention, the formation of a life plan, volitional motives - all this arises in the game and puts it at the highest level of development, raises it to the crest of a wave, makes it the ninth wave of development of preschool age, which rises to the whole deep waters, but relatively calm.

Essentially, it is through play activity that the child moves. Only in this sense can play be called a leading activity, i.e. determining the development of the child.

The second question is how does the game move? It is remarkable that the child begins with an imaginary situation, and this imaginary situation is initially very close to the real situation. A reproduction of a real situation takes place. Let's say a child, playing with dolls, almost repeats what his mother does to him; the doctor just looked at the child's throat, hurt him, he screamed, but as soon as the doctor left, he immediately climbs into the doll's mouth with a spoon.

This means that in the initial situation the rule is in the highest degree in a compressed, crumpled form. The very imaginary in the situation is also extremely little imaginary. It is an imaginary situation, but it becomes understandable in its relation to the just former real situation, i.e. it is a memory of something that was. Play is more reminiscent of memory than imagination, i.e. it is rather a memory in action than a new imaginary situation. As the game develops, we have a movement in the direction that the goal of the game is realized.

It is wrong to imagine that play is an activity without a goal; play is the target activity of the child. In sports games there is a win or a loss, you can run first and you can be second or last. In short, the goal decides the game. The goal becomes what everything else is done for. The goal, as the final moment, determines the child's affective attitude to play; running in a race, the child can be very worried and very upset; little can remain from his pleasure, because it is physically difficult for him to run, and if he is ahead of him, then he will experience little functional pleasure. The goal towards the end of the game in sports games becomes one of the dominant moments of the game, without which the game loses its meaning as much as looking at some tasty candy, putting it in your mouth, chewing and spitting it back out.

In the game, the goal set in advance is realized - who will reach the first.

At the end of development, a rule appears, and the more rigid it is, the more it requires adaptation from the child, the more it regulates the child's activity, the more intense and acute the game becomes. Simple running without a goal, without the rules of the game - this is a sluggish game that does not excite the guys.

Zero made it easier for children to play croquet. He shows how it demagnetizes, i.e. as for a child, the game loses its meaning as the rules fall away. Consequently, by the end of development, what was in the embryo at the beginning appears clearly in play. The goal is the rules. It was before, but in a minimized form. There is one more moment that is very important for a sports game - this is some kind of record, which is also very connected with the goal.

Take chess, for example. It is pleasant to win a chess game and it is unpleasant for a real player to lose it. Zero says that it is as pleasant for a child to run first as a handsome man looks at himself in a mirror; some sense of satisfaction is obtained.

Consequently, a complex of qualities arises, which comes forward at the end of the development of the game as much as it is curtailed at the beginning; moments, secondary or secondary at the beginning, become central at the end and vice versa - the moments dominating at the beginning at the end become secondary.

Finally, the third question - what kind of changes in the child's behavior does play produce? In play, the child is free, i.e. he determines his actions on the basis of his "I". But this is an illusory freedom. He subordinates his actions to a certain meaning, he acts on the basis of the meaning of a thing.

The child learns to be aware of his own actions, to be aware that every thing has a meaning.

The fact of creating an imaginary situation from the point of view of development can be viewed as a path to the development of abstract thinking; the rule connected with this, it seems to me, leads to the development of the child's actions, on the basis of which the division of play and labor, which we encounter at school age, as a basic fact, becomes possible.

I would like to draw your attention to one more point: the game is really a feature of preschool age.

According to the figurative expression of one of the researchers, the play of a child up to three years old has the character of a serious play, just like the play of a teenager, in a different, of course, sense of the word; serious play of a young child is that he plays without separating the imaginary situation from the real one.

In the schoolchild, play begins to exist in the form of a limited form of activity, mainly of the type of sports games, which play a certain role in the general development of the schoolchild, but do not have the significance that play has in the preschooler.

In appearance, play has little resemblance to what it leads to, and only an internal deep analysis of it makes it possible to determine the process of its movement and its role in the development of a preschooler.

At school age, the game does not die, but penetrates into relation to reality. It has its internal continuation in school teaching and work (compulsory activity with a rule). All consideration of the essence of the game showed us that a new relationship is created in the game between the semantic field, i.e. between a situation in thought and a real situation.

Based on materials from the "Journal of the Psychological Society. L. S. Vygotsky ".